Metaphors and similes are an imaginative galaxy which greater minds than mine have explored. That doesn’t stop me gathering dazzling and original examples to enliven human exchange, expanding the choice of vigorous, beautiful ways to sharpen how we think, read, write and speak.

Street cleaning

A graphic description of a drunkard preparing for his next binge with a water shot. Major Prohaska ordered soda water. Anyone who knew him well could predict that he would get very drunk tonight. He simply used water to clear the way for liquor, the way streets are...

A booming voice

A novel pair of similes to convey a loud, hard voice, including those weighted final syllables. "Congratulations!" said the father, his voice normal, in the hard German of army Slavs. The consonants boomed like thunderstorms and the final syllables were loaded with...

The effect of someone’s presence

A lovely simile to describe the effect of one person's presence on another. Her presence filled him through and through, like the sweet breeze blown across a hayfield. Source: Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund, trans. by Geoffrey Dunlop (Harmondsworth: Penguin...

As if …

Flying a tiny, fragile aircraft on a reconnaissance sortie, Saint-Exupéry finds the rudder has frozen, and nearly gives himself a heart attack trying to wrench it free. The flight is life-threatening not only due to enemy fire, and reflecting on this leads him to an...

As indispensable as …

A life-line for a Second World War pilot was the rubber tube. Saint-Exupéry's account vividly describes the physicality and encumbrance of flying a reconnaissance plane at the start of the war. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an...

Expert in the next room

Saint-Exupéry, on the aerial front line of a desperate war effort, sums up the difficulties facing the French military leadership; not lack of military knowledge or experience, but of access to the reality on the ground. The General Staff was like a first-rate bridge...

Someday the history of metaphor will be written and we shall at last grasp all the truths and misconceptions in which this intensely speculative subject abounds.

Source: Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010, p. 45

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Technique as dousing

In discussing the technique of writing, Seamus Heaney conjures a water diviner as a metaphor. At first glance far-fetched, as he follows it through, he builds a close parallel between...

Bright eyes like glass grapes

‘Bright eyes’ implies a warm, sparkling, engaging personality until you slam up against ‘rather like glass grapes’, and then you move into something vacuous and apart. I happen to like...

A hive of healing

A beautiful metaphor of a hive of bees working inside the heart to transmute ancient heartaches to the gold of honey. Surely a device to think of if you are...

The Land of Canaan

Kazantzakis seems to have studied - absorbed - the places of the Bible, bringing individual landscapes and particularities vividly to life. I can't recall a land being likened to air, rendering...

A shire-sized dust-sheet

The tearing of a dust-sheet isn’t an obvious sound to describe the dis-scabbarding of a Greek sword, and then Logue renders it even more striking by adding that singularly English...

Like sunlight on a landscape

You can see an overcast English landscape of rolling hills and fields, and a sudden break in the clouds pierced by a spotlight of sunshine. This is a lovely novel,...

As hard as …

I like this simile for an implacable nature, though in this case, let us mention that Poyser is only implacable in the face of bad farming. In many other respects...